Episode description

This bonus episode of Judaism Unbound is presented in partnership with Theatre Dybbuk. Once a month, their podcast -- called The Dybbukast -- releases a new episode, and we are proud to feature their second season's eighth episode as a bonus episode here on Judaism Unbound's feed. In each episode, they bring poems, plays, and other creative texts from throughout history to life, all while revealing their relationships to issues still present today. Subscribe to The Dybbukast on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else that podcasts are found.

The Exagoge of Ezekiel the Tragedian is the earliest documented Jewish play, thought to have been written in Alexandria, Egypt in the second century BCE.  From the fragments that remain, we know that it tells the biblical Exodus narrative in the style of a Greek tragedy. In 2016, theatre dybbuk combined the extant 269 lines with modern-day stories of refugees, immigrants, and other voices from the American experience to form a new adaptation, titled exagoge, that relates the ancient story to contemporary issues.

This episode, presented in collaboration with the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University, features performances from exagoge intercut with a conversation recorded at the annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in March 2022 between theatre dybbuk's artistic director, Aaron Henne, and Dr. Miriam Heller Stern. Dr. Stern, the Vice Provost for Educational Strategy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and founder of Beit HaYozter/the Creativity Braintrust, studied theatre dybbuk’s process alongside Dr. Tobin Belzer during the creation of the adaptation.